Latino USA delves into the increasing pressure put on refugees seeking safety in the United States via its southern border. It reveals the surprising support the Trump administration has received from a Mexican administration that once publicly spoke out against Trump’s rhetoric

U.S.-Mexico Border

The Trump administration indefinitely extended its coronavirus border restrictions Tuesday, finalizing a rule that has allowed the government to turn away asylum seekers and other immigrants for public health reasons

Ivan Valencia/Bloomberg via Getty Images photo at NPR. Caption: “A plantation of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, is seen in this aerial photograph taken above Tumaco, Colombia, on Feb. 26. The country’s military says former rebel fighters have turned to drug trafficking and other illegal operations in the area.”

The following are summaries of the human rights situations and cases we received that require action. We have divided them into three parts: military intelligence scandal, COVID-19 related concerns, and human rights abuses

They are effectively compelled to abandon their asylum claims and some who have a well-founded fear of persecution appear to be returning to their home countries where they are at real risk of serious harm

U.S.-Mexico Border

The latest slate of restrictions indicate that while the United States moves toward reopening, the federal government is not ready to ease measures put in place in March that largely sealed off the US to stem the spread of Covid-19

As the nation remains focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government has aggressively begun to rush the deportations of some of the most vulnerable migrant children in its care to countries where they have been raped, beaten or had a parent killed

The current administration is using the imprimatur of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to circumvent laws and treaty protections designed to save lives and enable the mass expulsion of asylum seekers and unaccompanied children

Venezuela

We emphatically urge the reactivation of a credible, balanced, and inclusive mechanism with feasible goals that is facilitated by recognized mediators to advance legitimate solutions to the Venezuelan crisis

Officers routinely gun down people without restraint, protected by their bosses and the knowledge that even if they are investigated for illegal killings, it will not keep them from going back out onto the beat

In a report titled, in Spanish, “They Call Us the Crazy Women With the Shovels,” the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center shines a light on Mexico’s forced disappearance crisis by telling the stories of nine mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters searching for their loved ones.

Colombia is still contending with revelations that Army intelligence has been spying and building detailed dossiers on reporters, judges, politicians, human rights defenders, and other law-abiding civilians. La Silla Vacía bravely profiles some of the generals and colonels involved in the scandal, and what their involvement probably looked like.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a decree this week giving the military a leading role in policing for the remainder of his government (through 2024). SinEmbargolooks at some of the things that the vaguely worded decree now allows the armed forces to do, with unclear civilian supervision.

A detailed report by Human Rights First offers the best current overview of how the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response, including blanket expulsions of asylum-seeking Mexicans and Central Americans—including unaccompanied children, is worsening the humanitarian situation along the border.

At The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer points out two vectors by which the Trump administration’s immigration hard line is spreading the coronavirus right now: via deportations and in ICE detention centers. Guatemala’s health minister tells Blitzer that the United States has become “the Wuhan of the Americas.” An unnamed U.S. official tells him, “The White House doesn’t have time for Guatemala’s bullsh*t. Deportations must continue.”

Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela

Citing peace negotiation protocols, Cuba refused Colombia’s request to extradite ten ELN leaders living in Havana after the group claimed responsibility for the January 2019 bombing of a Bogota police academy

Honduras

Mauricio Oliva Herrera, president of the National Congress, allegedly acquired a series of properties in Tegucigalpa from a business associate at Inversiones Acrópolis, a company linked to a notorious Honduran drug trafficking family

A new order under review by several government agencies is intended to extend the restrictions indefinitely. Once issued by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., the border restrictions would stay in effect until he decides the virus no longer poses a threat

After seeking answers on this issue for nearly two months, the lawmakers received a deeply flawed legal opinion from the Department of State in late April that the administration apparently concocted after the Asylum Ban had been in effect for more than a month

Venezuela

Guaidó’s political survival depends not only on his capacity to rebuild what was already a fragile alliance of political parties to promote a transition to democracy, but also on his ties to the country’s civil society, which today is debating whether or not to distance itself

Haiti

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight, which landed in Port-au-Prince from San Antonio, Texas, shortly before 1 p.m. Monday, arrived with only 50 passengers — 14 with criminal backgrounds and 36 others, including children — aboard rather than the 100 deportees

Mexico, U.S.-Mexico Border

Since the U.S. began the expulsions, on March 21, it has sent over 20,000 migrants back, mainly to Mexico. About a third of them are Central Americans. The health of those migrants has been endangered for weeks

The administration has weaponized an arcane provision of a quarantine law first enacted in 1893 and revised in 1944 to order the blanket deportation of asylum-seekers and unaccompanied minors at the Mexican border

In Colombia, the newsmagazine Semana has had a series of scoops about illegal activity in the powerful Army’s intelligence apparatus. The latest reveals bits of 130 files that Army spies have been keeping on people who pose no threat at all to Colombia: reporters (including U.S. reporters), politicians, human rights defenders, and even other members of the military and government. (I posted an English explanation of the scandals this week.)

AP’s Josh Goodman first reported on a group of mercenaries’ clumsy, underfunded, improvised plan to infiltrate Venezuela and capture Nicolás Maduro. Days later at The Washington Post, Anthony Faiola, Karen DeYoung, and Ana Vanessa Herrero dig into the story leading up to the failure, with lots of atmospherics and more information about main characters like Special Forces vet Jordan Goudreau and J.J. Rendón, an ethically challenged strategist who electoral campaigns around the region have hired for years.

Struggling towns like Natchez, Mississippi and Lumpkin, Georgia have come to depend economically on ICE detention centers run by for-profit corporations. Politicovisits these towns and raises concerns about what could happen if (when) coronavirus cases multiply inside the facilities.

In Guerrero—long one of Mexico’s poorest and most violent states—criminal groups are fragmenting, “self-defense” groups are confederating, and “the line separating state and armed groups is thin to non-existent,” explains a report by the International Crisis Group.

Colombia’s El Espectador published a special report on the embattled region of Catatumbo, in the northeast near the Venezuelan border. While it focuses on the struggle of the region’s social leaders, the report also includes some remarkably detailed maps of armed actors, coca, fuel theft, threats and attacks, and “tensions with the security forces” in 10 of the region’s municipalities.

The doubling of the rate of deaths is estimated at only 5 days and a recent study by Imperial College (London, UK), which analysed the active transmission rate of COVID-19 in 48 countries, showed that Brazil is the country with the highest rate of transmission (R0 of 2·81)

Peru

Something of a tectonic shift in a society whose politics have long been dominated by what the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky has dubbed the “Lima consensus,” the ultra-conservative creed of free market capitalism

Immigration advocates say the policy has deprived some people of the right to seek asylum. It is set to expire May 20, but the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan, said it may need to be extended

May 7, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

McEntee, a 29-year-old former campaign staffer who has the president’s ear, is turning his focus to immigration as the 2020 election approaches. But the effort has faced resistance from Matthew Albence

Haiti

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, who has been living in the U.S. since fleeing Haiti in December 1994 and until recently was an inmate at a New York state prison following his 2008 conviction for mortgage fraud and grand larceny, was given the deportation reprieve

U.S.-Mexico Border

The president’s determination to have the steel bollards coated in black has fluctuated during the past several years, and military commanders and border officials believed as recently as last fall that they had finally talked him out of it

Venezuela

Goudreau claimed to have 800 men ready to penetrate Venezuela and “extract” Maduro and his henchmen, according to J.J. Rendón, the Venezuelan political strategist tapped by Guaidó to help lead the secretive committee

Mexico

Crime rates are climbing across Mexico, as cartels splinter into smaller groups competing ferociously for turf. Just one state, Guerrero, contends with at least 40 such outfits. The government needs a tailored approach for each region, focused on protecting the public and reforming the police

Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said authorities arrested two U.S. citizens among a group of “mercenaries” on Monday, a day after a beach raid purportedly aimed at capturing the socialist leader that authorities say they foiled

The chief of Colombia’s armed forces vowed on Sunday to get to the bottom of an ongoing scandal over spying on journalists, politicians and judges by what he described as rogue elements within the country’s army

Colombia, Venezuela

Goudreau had been working with a retired Venezuelan army general now facing U.S. narcotics charges to train dozens of deserters from Venezuela’s security forces at secret camps inside neighboring Colombia

El Salvador

The United States invested many years and billions of dollars in fostering democracy in El Salvador during and after its bloody civil war. It would be a tragedy if Mr. Trump allowed Mr. Bukele to undo that achievement on the pretext of fighting gangs and the pandemic

Honduras

Rather than sending refugees to a country that cannot or will not protect them, the United States should support stronger refugee protection across the region, uphold its own asylum legal obligations at home, and support effective human rights, anti-corruption and rule of law initiatives in Honduras

U.S.-Mexico Border

From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders